Today, the company released its GeForce Game Ready 397.31 WHQL-certified drivers and stayed true to its words: it’s only available for 64-bit operating systems. This release also drops support for Fermi GPUs, such as the GTX 580, 560 Ti, 480, and several others.

The new driver brings a host of new features and improvements for both gamers and developers.

Gamers are set to gain support for new sample rates – 32Khz, 88.2Khz, and 176.4KHz – for audio output to HDMI devices from all supported GPUs, along with optimizations for two just-released titles: BattleTech by Harebrained Schemes and Frostpunk by 11 bit studios.

There’s also added or updated SLI profiles for these titles:

Descenders

Frostpunk

Warhammer: Vermintide 2

Far Cry 5

The standalone installer with this release has been updated as well, it will now delete the extracted installation files after the driver installation is complete – this used to be a cumbersome manual process, until now.

Developers, on the other hand, are receiving full support for Vulkan 1.1 as well as a developer preview of the Nvidia RTX ray tracing technology for DirectX 12, that was demoed at GDC last month.

There are a number of bug fixes in this update:

[GeForce GTX 1080 Ti][Doom]: The game crashes due to the driver reverting to OpenGL 1.1 when HDR is enabled. [2049623]

[GeForce GTX 1060][Far Cry 5]: The game crashes after a few minutes of game play. [2096077]

NvfbcPluginWindow temporarily prevents Windows from shutting down after launching a Steam game. [2068833]

[NVIDIA Control Panel][SLI][Diablo III]: With V-Sync on and SLI enabled, the game freezes after switching windows (ALT+TAB) a few times. [1951584]

There's also a long list of known issues with this release, but Nvidia also provides a workaround for a few of them, which we have emphasized:

Windows 10 Issues

[Microsoft Edge][HDR] With HDR turned ON, video playback in full-screen mode on an HDR display may cause corruption of the video and desktop.

Workaround: Manually turning the monitor off and on again may help.

[Far Cry 5]: Green flickering occurs in the game when using HDR with non-native resolution.

Workaround: It may help to quit the game and relaunch it while at the desired resolution. Nvidia also recommends to try Alt+Tab out of the game and then back in, or press Alt+Enter to switch to windowed mode, and then press it again to go back to exclusive-full-screen mode.

Workaround: These features require the Microsoft Media Foundation package, so make sure to install that.

Additional Issues

Gears of War 4 may randomly crash

Custom color settings reset on reboot in Windows 10 FCU

Note: Nvidia is working with Microsoft to resolve this issue.

Starcraft 2 shows black screen on exit on Kepler GPUs

In Surround, center display renders videos black

Netflix playback may occasionally stutter

As evident by the notes, this release comes with quite a few issues. Additionally, the release notes also state that this release does not support the Microsoft Surface Book devices, adding that support for those will be available in a future release.

The 397.31 WHQL-certified drivers can be downloaded via the GeForce Experience app on Windows, or via the links down below. The complete release notes are available here.